Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic ADVERTISEMENTThe European Commission\u2019s funding of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is \u201copaque\u201d and exposes the executive to \u201creputational risk\u201d, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) has concluded following a lengthy probe. But its report may not be the smoking gun that some critics were hoping for.\u201cWe did not find a single case during our audit of an NGO breaching EU values,\u201d the ECA member responsible for the report, Laima Andrikien\u0117, told reporters at a briefing shortly before publication.This came with the caveat, however, that her office had examined a random sample of only 90 contracts, and may have missed something. \u201cWe have hundreds of thousands of NGOs,\u201d Andrikien\u0117 said. \u201cAny case, any example of NGOs breaching EU values would put the reputation of the European Union at risk.\u201dShe further confirmed that there was no legal barrier to civil society groups making their case directly to lawmakers, who are required to publish details of all meetings with lobbyists, whether civil society or corporate.\u201cFrom our point of view, the rules allowed NGOs to lobby,\u201d Andrikien\u0117. \u201cIf we want something different, it is for the legislators to decide, not for the auditors.\u201dThe ECA published its findings at a time when the issue of NGO funding has become a divisive political issue in Brussels. The European Parliament rejected by a single vote last week a motion to censure the EU executive over operating grants disbursed through the LIFE environmental programme.The conservative European People\u2019s Party (EPP) claims the Commission instructed NGOs to lobby members of the parliament to further specific policies within the Green Deal, a central political agenda of president Ursula von der Leyen\u2019s first term between 2019 and 2024.A lack of \u2018hard evidence\u2019However, the group and its allies further to the right have not presented any concrete proof to back up these allegations.Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin, however, conceded in January that it had been \u201cinappropriate for some services in the Commission to enter into agreements that oblige NGOs to lobby members of the European Parliament specifically\u201d.But despite the machinations of some groups within the parliament and media investigations of leaked copies of confidential operational grant agreements, no such obligations \u2013 which have been vehemently denied by environmental groups \u2013 have been demonstrated.And it seems the Luxembourg-based audit office \u2013 which looked at two LIFE Progamme operating grants (no NGOs are named in the report) during its investigation \u2013 has drawn the same blank.Some \u201celements of lobbying\u201d were detailed in the work programmes that applicants must draw up when applying for grants, said Tomasz Kokot, an ECA official who worked on the audit. But the auditors were in no position to say whether \u2013 as right-wing lawmakers have asserted \u2013 Commission officials had demanded such commitments from the applicants.\u201cAll we can say is that we have not found hard evidence for any of those situations,\u201d Kokot told reporters.The auditors were also pressed on why they chose to focus their probe on NGOs only in Germany, Spain and Sweden, despite explicitly stating that\u00a0a major factor that prompted their investigation was the 2022 scandal involving Qatari officials, where NGOs were allegedly used to channel cash to corrupt lawmakers \u2013 an affair that rumbles on.\u201cWe chose them because they had the largest expenditure reported,\u201d Andrikien\u0117 said, naming European Social Fund Plus and the Asylum, Migration and Integration fund as the two largest sources.ADVERTISEMENTThe Commission\u2019s responseThe ECA made three recommendations to the Commission. The EU executive said it \u201cpartially accepts\u201d to update the legal definition of an NGO to clarify by the end of the year the criteria for \u201cindependence from government\u201d and the situation when an \u201centity is pursuing its members\u2019 commercial interests\u201d.Similarly, on a call to improve the searchable Financial Transparency System detailing EU spending online by 2029, the Commission said it would \u201cexplore the feasibility\u201d of implementing more frequent updates.The third recommendation was the only one that the EU executive accepted fully: to \u201cexplore the feasibility of developing the current systems to include risk-based verification of the recipients\u2019 (including NGOs\u2019) compliance with EU values, in order to detect potential breaches\u201d. The target deadline is 2028.On the issue of alleged lobbying via NGOs, the Commission pointed to guidance published last May \u2013 shortly after the audit was launched \u2013 which \u201cclarified that funding agreements involving specifically detailed activities directed at EU institutions and some of their representatives, even if legally sound, may entail a reputational risk for the Union\u201d.ADVERTISEMENTOfficials responsible for allocating funding must take this guidance into account, it wrote.Ariel Brunner, the director of BirdLife Europe \u2013 a \u00a0recipient of an operating grant \u2013 saw the ECA\u2019s failure to identify any problems with LIFE Programme funding as a vindication. \u201cThis report confirms what we’ve long said: the real problem isn’t reputable NGOs \u2013 it’s lobbyists in disguise, posing as civil society.\u201d\u201cWhat they did find is a failure by the Commission and national governments to check who\u2019s actually behind some so-called NGOs that don\u2019t represent public interests,\u201d Brunner said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic ADVERTISEMENTThe European Commission\u2019s funding of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is \u201copaque\u201d and exposes the executive to \u201creputational risk\u201d, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) has concluded following a lengthy probe. But its report may not be the smoking gun that some critics were hoping for.\u201cWe<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":267254,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-267253","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267253"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":267255,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267253\/revisions\/267255"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}